The reputation of the FBI is sinking, and it is sinking fast. The new revelations that seem to come out every day are not just embarrassing, but increasingly serious and dangerous. With the sometimes sketchy history of the Federal law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI; why have we been so explicit in our praise? Is it really just a few bad apples at the top or is there something more systematic? There has been quite a few mishaps and flat-out abuses of power over their history. A thorough house cleaning and transparency is definitely in order.

History of the FBI

The FBI was formed in 1908 under the name Bureau of Investigation. In 1924 the most famous FBI director in history, Herbert Hoover, took over running the agency at the age of 24. In 1935 the bureau was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover led the agency for over 40 years. During this time illegal wiretapping and other actions against Civil Rights leaders and private citizens were rampant. The most famous and biggest files were Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King. The constitutional abuses against the citizens it was supposed to be protecting was widespread and when revealed, extremely embarrassing and troubling.

Concern of Corruption in the FBI Is Not New

In 1992 the FBI was one of the Federal agencies that surrounded a remote cabin in Idaho, which was occupied by the Weaver family. They believed Randy Weaver to have violated federal gun laws. Whether he was set up or in violation of any laws is still in dispute. Afterward, when the dust settled, Weaver's wife, Vicki and 14-year-old son Sam were dead. So was a Deputy US Marshal. Eventually, the Weaver family would sue the government and win over $3 million in court. The actions and conduct of the Feds were highly criticized. Barely a year later in 1993, the FBI was at it again in Waco Texas, with alleged firearm violations against a group called the Branch Davidians, a 7th-day Adventist offshoot. The compound in Waco was filled with men, women, and children. Like Before, when the dust cleared 76 people were dead, and the compound was burned to the ground. Four federal agents were also dead. Once again the federal agencies were heavily criticized and sued.

In another case of Federal malfeasance, the FBI leaked intel and ruined the life of security guard Richard Jewell over the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. Although Jewell found the pipe bomb and helped evacuate people, undoubtedly saving lives, he became the subject of surveillance and investigation. Some of this was leaked to the media causing mass scrutiny of his life. Although he was eventually cleared and won some libel lawsuits against the media, his life was never the same. He died at the age of 44, a forgotten hero who had been treated horribly by the FBI and media.

A less well-known FBI miscalculation and mistake was the decades it used a special bullet analysis system to trace bullets, supposedly down to a specific box of ammo. The National Academy of Science eventually proved this to be false, and the FBI stopped using this method, but it took decades, and the amount and extent of cases tainted are still unknown.

The most egregious and deadly of the FBI’s failures was missing the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. While it was not the FBI alone, they did miss or discount the many warnings about the possibilities of plane attacks and large groups of Middle Eastern men taking flying lessons. Taking off was an important topic, but the landing was not. Apparently, this was not a red flag for the FBI.

Then of course in 2013 the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three civilians as well as a police officer three days later. A prior FBI interview with the Tsarnaev's and warnings from the Russian government was not enough for the FBI to act.

The recent Dismissal of the case against the Bundy family concerning grazing rights and Federal land in Nevada is just another example of the Feds (and politicians) gone wild. Withholding information and lying about FBI snipers and surveillance caused the judge to dismiss the case “with prejudice.” Once again lawsuits are in the making.

More Details Lead to More Scrutiny of the FBI

The mass murder in parkland Florida is unfortunately just the latest in government policy and action failure. This is, of course, a still-developing situation, but with every new revelation, the government is looking increasingly bad and inept. This horrific mass murder seems to fall mostly on the failure of local and state authorities, but once again the FBI is involved and appears to have failed the very people it was supposed to protect. We will have to see how this plays out.

Nobody should dispute that the FBI has done amazing things in fighting crime, spies and protecting this country. They have done amazing things with criminal investigation procedures and tactics that they invented or perfected. However, is it just a handful of people at the top or is it a bigger problem? The FBI is entrusted with enormous power over the citizens of this country, but it seems there is a huge problem of accountability, transparency, and oversight. This is an immediate and dangerous problem. It needs to be addressed by serious people, with the public being made aware of everything. They do work for us after all.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes threatened FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with contempt of Congress and impeachment if they fail to turn over unredacted documents requested by congressional investigators.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham challenged Nunes Tuesday evening to take action, citing the fact that Eric Holder had been held in contempt for covering up the release of documents pertaining to the Fast and Furious scandal.

“People have been asking why is it that you haven’t yet held anyone in contempt of Congress,” Ingraham noted. “Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress as I recall over the Fast and Furious documents. What gives here?”

Nunes explained that investigators issued a subpoena for unredacted documents pertaining to the FBI’s justification to pursue a Trump/Russia collusion investigation back in August.

“We’re at a boiling point where we need this two-page document,” he demanded seven months later.

A letter from Nunes to Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray followed the subpoena saying that their unwillingness to work with investigators could result in “the Committee pursuing all appropriate legal remedies, including seeking civil enforcement.”

Let's stop all of these congressional hearings. Don wants to fire Rosenstein, Mueller and Christopher Wray. I will bet the best beer in Monroe that it doesn't happen. Who wants to "slap leather"? And if he does fire them all, he will turn this country upside down, just when you thought it couldn't possibly be more divided. Reminds me of a song... see the link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur2BQoUtEH0

In normal times, the televisions are humming at the FBI’s 56 field offices nationwide, piping in the latest news as agents work their investigations. But these days, some agents say, the TVs are often off to avoid the crush of bad stories about the FBI itself. The bureau, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump. “I don’t care what channel it’s on,” says Tom O’Connor, a veteran investigator in Washington who leads the FBI Agents Association. “All you hear is negative stuff about the FBI … It gets depressing.”

Many view Trump’s attacks as self-serving: he has called the renowned agency an “embarrassment to our country” and its investigations of his business and political dealings a “witch hunt.” But as much as the bureau’s roughly 14,000 special agents might like to tune out the news, internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers, looking past the partisan haze, see a troubling picture: something really is wrong at the FBI.

The Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, will soon release a much-anticipated assessment of Democratic and Republican charges that officials at the FBI interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. That year-long probe, sources familiar with it tell TIME, is expected to come down particularly hard on former FBI director James Comey, who is currently on a high-profile book tour. It will likely find that Comey breached Justice Department protocols in a July 5, 2016, press conference when he criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as Secretary of State even as he cleared her of any crimes, the sources say. The report is expected to also hit Comey for the way he reopened the Clinton email probe less than two weeks before the election, the sources say.

The report closely follows an earlier one in April by Horowitz, which showed that the ousted deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, had lied to the bureau’s internal investigations branch to cover up a leak he orchestrated about Clinton’s family foundation less than two weeks before the election. (The case has since been referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for potential prosecution.) Another IG report in March found that FBI retaliation against internal whistle-blowers was continuing despite years of bureau pledges to fix the problem. Last fall, Horowitz found that the FBI wasn’t adequately investigating “high-risk” employees who failed polygraph tests.

There have been other painful, more public failures as well: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fla., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material. And then there’s potentially the widest-reaching failure of all: the FBI’s miss of the Russian influence operation against the 2016 election, which went largely undetected for more than two years.

The “deep state” is in a deep state of desperation. With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.

At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton “matter,” but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.

In no way would a fourth-hand report from a Maltese professor justify wholesale targeting of four or five members of the Trump campaign. It took Christopher Steele, with his funding concealed through false campaign filings, to be incredibly successful at creating a vast echo chamber around his unverified, fanciful dossier, bouncing it back and forth between the press and the FBI so it appeared that there were multiple sources all coming to the same conclusion.

Time and time again, investigators came up empty. Even several sting operations with an FBI spy we just learned about failed to produce a DeLorean-like video with cash on the table. But rather than close the probe, the deep state just expanded it. All they had were a few isolated contacts with Russians and absolutely nothing related to Trump himself, yet they pressed forward. Egged on by Steele, they simply believed Trump and his team must be dirty. They just needed to dig deep enough.

Perhaps the murkiest event in the timeline is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of a special counsel after he personally recommended Comey’s firing in blistering terms. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions shoved out of the way, Rosenstein and Mueller then ignored their own conflicts and took charge anyway. Rosenstein is a fact witness, and Mueller is a friend of Comey, disqualifying them both.

Flush with 16 prosecutors, including a former lawyer for the Clinton Foundation, and an undisclosed budget, the Mueller investigation has been a scorched-earth effort to investigate the entirety of the Trump campaign, Trump business dealings, the entire administration and now, if it was not Russia, maybe it’s some other country.

The president’s earlier legal team was naive in believing that, when Mueller found nothing, he would just end it. Instead, the less investigators found, the more determined and expansive they became. This president and his team now are on a better road to put appropriate limits on all this.

This process must now be stopped, preferably long before a vote in the Senate. Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.

Its prosecutions have all been principally to pressure witnesses with unrelated charges and threats to family, or just for a public relations effect, like the indictment of Russian internet trolls. Unfortunately, just like the Doomsday Machine in “Dr. Strangelove” that was supposed to save the world but instead destroys it, the Mueller investigation comes with no “off” switch: You can’t fire Mueller. He needs to be defeated, like Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Clinton.

Finding the “off” switch will not be easy. Step one here is for the Justice Department inspector general report to knock Comey out of the witness box. Next, the full origins of the investigation and its lack of any real intelligence needs to come out in the open. The attorney general, himself the target of a secret investigation, needs to take back his Justice Department. Sessions needs to act quickly, along with U.S. Attorney John Huber, appointed to conduct an internal review of the FBI, on the Comey and McCabe matters following the inspector general report, and then announce an expanded probe into other abuses of power.

The president’s lawyers need to extend their new aggressiveness from words to action, filing complaints with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the failure of Mueller and Rosenstein to recuse themselves and going into court to question the tactics of the special counsel, from selective prosecutions on unrelated matters, illegally seizing Government Services Administration emails, covering up the phone texts of FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and operating without a scope approved by the attorney general. (The regulations call for the attorney general to recuse himself from the investigation but appear to still leave him responsible for the scope.)

The final stopper may be the president himself, offering two hours of testimony, perhaps even televised live from the White House. The last time America became obsessed with Russian influence in America was the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. Those ended only when Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) attacked an associate of the U.S. Army counsel, Joseph Welch, and Welch famously responded: “Sir, have you no decency?” In this case, virtually every associate and family member of the president has been subject to smears conveniently leaked to the press.

Stopping Mueller isn’t about one president or one party. It’s about all presidents and all parties. It’s about cleaning out and reforming the deep state so that our intelligence operations are never used against opposing campaigns without the firmest of evidence. It’s about letting people work for campaigns and administrations without needing legal defense funds. It’s about relying on our elections to decide our differences.

Mark Penn served as pollster and adviser to President Clinton from 1995 to 2000, including during his impeachment. He is chairman of the Harris Poll and author of “Microtrends Squared.” Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Penn.

Somehow the former commander-in-chief is largely absent from the political spying drama.

By James Freeman

May 18, 2018 4:21 p.m. ET

President Donald Trump tweets today: “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!” And what does the man who was serving at the time as the FBI’s ultimate boss have to say about all this?

Perhaps it’s a good moment to get the whole story from our 44th President. He should now have time to discuss his administration’s surveillance of affiliates of a presidential campaign because he has just prevailed in a contentious dispute.

The Associated Press reports, “Plan for Obama Presidential Center advances over protests.” According to the AP:

Construction of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago took a major step forward Thursday with a city commission’s decision to sign off on the project after hours of testimony from both supporters and opponents of the project.

The Chicago Plan Commission unanimously approved a proposal to build former President Barack Obama’s center in Jackson Park on the city’s South Side. The action came over protests from opponents who want an agreement that local residents will benefit from the $500 million project.

“Community residents have no ownership, no say-so, no input,” said Devondrick Jeffers. “We know this is a huge investment in the community, but it’s not truly an investment if residents don’t benefit from this as well.”

However, Obama Presidential Center supporters cheered the plans for the presidential center, saying it would bring job opportunities to the area and foster economic development.

Since his name is on the door, there really was no way for Mr. Obama to avoid being at the center of this story. But in a somewhat larger story he has remained largely—and strangely—absent.

“‘Bigger Than Watergate’? Both Sides Say Yes, but for Different Reasons” is the headline on a New York Times story about our current President and the federal investigation of suspected collusion with Russia. The Times reports that both Mr. Trump and his political adversaries like using the Watergate analogy:

Mr. Trump was referring to what he deems a deep-state conspiracy to get him. His detractors are referring to the various scandals swirling around Mr. Trump.

Watergate has long been the touchstone for modern American scandal, the mountain of misconduct against which all others are judged. In the 44 years since Richard M. Nixon resigned, virtually every political investigation has been likened to the one that brought down a president, the suffix “gate” applied to all sorts of public flaps, no matter how significant or trivial.

But rarely has the comparison been as intense and persistent as during the 16 months since Mr. Trump took office — a comparison deployed by both sides in hopes of shaping the narrative of wrongdoing. What started out as an inquiry into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election has mushroomed into questions of perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, abuse of power, illicit spying, hush money, tax fraud, money laundering and influence peddling.

Many of those questions remain unanswered but we do know that the “deep state” referenced by the Times did have a boss in 2016. Yet Mr. Obama doesn’t show up in this story until the ninth paragraph. Those inclined toward Watergate analogies will say that it was some time before the break-in was connected to Richard Nixon, and of course we have no idea at this point whether the current controversy will end up being a Trump scandal, an Obama scandal or a permanently murky partisan battleground.

But since this controversy goes to the core of our democratic process, Americans desperately want clarity. How and why exactly did leaders of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies end up focusing on a domestic political campaign? The latest essential reading from the Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel gets to the heart of the matter:

Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands—one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials—all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI—and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected—and one crucial question is how early that happened.

By this point it seems clear that Mr. Obama didn’t think much of the theory that Mr. Trump colluded with the Russians. But presumably he learned quite a bit about his government’s efforts to investigate it. It’s not clear what an FBI official meant in 2016 when texting that President Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” But we can assume that the President was fairly well-informed about the law enforcement agencies reporting to him. Therefore let’s hear from him in detail the full history of how the government came to investigate the presidential campaign of the party out of power.

If he doesn’t know, then it would seem a public explanation is also in order—about his management, and about just how far the “deep state” went without specific presidential approval.

It is a fact that the assessments of the CIA, NSA, FBI and ODNI all led to the conclusion that these espionage attacks were from Russia. Secondly, it wasn’t a “spy”; it was an FBI informant assigned to see if Russia was meddling in our election. To me, Trump’s investigation into the investigators is a total WITCH HUNT. I believe that this is just another attempt by Trump and Giuliani to discredit Robert Mueller’s findings in the probe into Russian interference of the 2016 election.

A bombshell inspector general report released Thursday revealed that several FBI employees improperly received gifts from reporters, in connection with possible leaks of sensitive information.

Although public details of these exchanges are scant, they could constitute prosecutable violations of federal gift-giving rules.

The gifts in question included “tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events.”

“We will separately report on those investigations as they are concluded, consistent with the Inspector General Act, other applicable federal statutes, and OIG policy,” the report reads.

Gifting rules for executive branch officials are strict and exacting. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics provides that “executive branch employees may not solicit or accept gifts that are given because of their official positions or that come from certain interested sources (‘prohibited sources’).”

The rules define a prohibited source as a person who:

Is seeking official action by, is doing business or seeking to do business with, or is regulated by the employee’s agency; or

Has interests that may be substantially affected by performance or nonperformance of the employee’s official duties.

Those definitions derive from the U.S. Code that states violations will be sanctioned “in accordance with any applicable laws, executive orders, and rules or regulations.” (RELATED: IG Report: FBI Agents Received Free Handouts From Journalists)

These rules apply to government officials, and it is not clear if any reporters involved in these dealings could face any sort of punishment.

It’s also not clear a reporter should be considered a “prohibited source” within the meaning of the provided definitions.

Violations of gift-giving rules are sometimes prosecuted as violations of the honest services fraud (HSF) statute. High profile office-holders indicted for gift violations under this law include Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and former GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia. Jack Abramoff, the notorious Washington lobbyist, was convicted of honest services fraud.

The HSF statute is a controversial tool, as its vague provisions permit an enterprising prosecutor to make a criminal case out of good faith mistakes or generally harmless conduct. The U.S. Supreme Court dramatically narrowed the reach of the law in a 2010 case called Skilling v. U.S., confining its use to cases involving bribes or kickbacks.

Violations of federal anti-corruption laws occur when a public employee takes “official action” in exchange for gifts. The high court has confined the meaning of “official action” to include only formal exercises of power in official proceedings. It’s not clear that leaking to a reporter falls within this definition, although other federal laws may criminalize this conduct.

Criminal cases notwithstanding, unauthorized media contacts involving the exchange of gifts could serve as a basis for other administrative penalties, like reassignment, suspension or termination.

President Trump unloads on Comey, 'scum on top' of FBI a day after damning IG report's release

President Trump broke his silence on the scathing inspector general's report with a vengeance Friday, first tweeting that the FBI boss he fired was the "worst" in the bureau's history, then crashing "Fox & Friends" for an impromptu interview where he continued to blister the "scum on top" of the Obama-era bureau.

The president’s comments came a day after the release of the report, which was the result of an 18-month-long investigation by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Trump said the report, which found ex-FBI Director James Comey was insubordinate, showed Trump was justified in firing him.

“The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI," Trump tweeted early Friday. "Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI. I did a great service to the people in firing him. Good Instincts. Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!”

In the interview with Fox's Steve Doocy, Trump made it clear he considered Comey the leader of those "minions."

"I think Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves," Trump said.

"If you took a poll at the FBI, [I would win]," Trump told Doocy. "I mean the real FBI, not the scum on top.”

Horowitz's report faulted Comey for going over the heads of his superiors, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, by holding a press conference to announce the FBI’s decision not to press criminal charges against Clinton. At that July, 2016 news conference, Comey called the then-presidential candidate's actions “extremely careless,” rather than “grossly negligent,” as drafted in the initial exoneration statement.

Critics have suggested that Trump's firing of Comey amounted to obstruction of justice, though Deputy Attorney General wrote a recommendation that Comey be fired. Trump reportedly told Russian officials in May, 2017 that Comey was a "real nutjob," and indicated the firing had to do with "facing great pressure because of Russia," in an apparent reference to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into alleged collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Trump later denied that his decision to fire Comey was linked to the Russia probe.

The IG report also focused on political bias within the bureau—specifically referring to FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who first came under scrutiny in December over a series of politically-charged, anti-Trump text messages they exchanged.

The inspector general released new text messages between the two—suggesting that they would “stop” Trump from becoming president.

“[Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Right!?” Page texted Strzok in August 2016.

The report revealed that more bureau officials than previously thought were exchanging anti-Trump messages. The inspector general referred five FBI employees for further investigation.

The inspector general’s office uncovered numerous messages that “appeared to mix political opinion with discussions about the MYE investigation.”

MYE, or “Midyear Exam,” was the code used in the FBI to refer to the investigation into Clinton’s private email server.

“Some of these text messages and instant messages mixed political commentary with discussions about the Midyear investigation, and raised concerns that political bias may have impacted investigative decisions,” the report read.

The report noted that it was specifically concerned about text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page that “potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations.”

Strzok and Page, who were romantically involved, both served for a short period of time on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team. Strzok was reassigned following the revelations of his anti-Trump texts. Page resigned from the bureau last month.

But while many of those texts were made public in late 2017, the IG report revealed a new one in which Strzok vowed to "stop" Trump from becoming president -- and made clear that as many as five total FBI employees exchanged politically charged messages. "The text messages and instant messages sent by these employees included statements of hostility toward then candidate Trump and statements of support for candidate Clinton," the report said.

"I don’t know how Peter Strzok is working there anymore," Trump told Doocy.

The report revealed instant messages between unnamed agents, labeled “Agent 1” and “Agent 5,” discussing their jobs in August 2016.

“I find anyone who enjoys [this job] an absolute f---ing idiot. If you don’t think so, ask them one more question. Who are you voting for? I guarantee you it will be Donald Drumpf,” Agent 1 sent.

“I forgot about drumpf…that’s so sad and pathetic if they want to vote for him,” Agent 5 responded. “Someone who can’t answer a question. Someone who can’t be professional for even a second.”

“I’m trying to think of a ‘would I rather’ instead of spending time with those people,” Agent 5 sent.

Agent 1 asked, “stick your tongue in a fan??”

Agent 5 later wrote: “I would rather have brunch with trump and a bunch of his supporters like the ones from ohio that are retarded.”

The report did not, however, find evidence connecting those political opinions held by FBI officials to decisions made in the Clinton investigation.

In a statement to Fox News, Strzok’s attorney Aitan Goelman defended Strzok’s work at the FBI.

“After a year-long investigation that included a review of millions of communications and interviews of scores of witnesses, the IG concluded that there is no evidence that the political views of Special Agent Strzok and others in the FBI impacted the handling of the Clinton email investigation,” Goelman said. “As the Report notes, Special Agent Strzok in particular was consistently thorough and aggressive, sometimes to the point that put him at odds with senior officials at the Department of Justice.”

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